The thread for space cadets!

The mystery hut, spotted by Yutu-2 rover on the far side of the moon turns out to be :

A ROCK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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a rock strategically placed on the spot with 4K camera pinned on all four corners and whstnot . But yeah , there have been more overt things in the years gone by .
 
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I had not realised the heat shield was so powerful, reducing the tempurature by a factor of 10 (383K to 38K?).
 
I had not realised the heat shield was so powerful, reducing the tempurature by a factor of 10 (383K to 38K?).

It's in space, so forget everything what common sense tells you about temperature. It helps that space acts as a radiative heat sink at 3K.

Nevertheless, radiative cooling goes with T^4, so to reduce temperature by a factor of 10 you need to reduce the heat influx by a factor of 10000. Which is quite impressive.
 
L2 is really nice because it only takes a little fuel to stay there.

And since the spot is not stable, it has not filled up with space debris over millions of years.


My friend asked me what happens if a space rock hits the telescope.
Boom? Nothing good.
 
The telescope has successfully deployed!

Now they just need to take 3 months to cool down and slowly adjust the mirrors.
Should be done in mid-April.
James Webb begins careful, slow process of aligning mirrors | Digital Trends

To achieve that, the engineers began by sending commands to the 126 actuators which will move the primary mirror segments as well as six devices that position the secondary mirror to ensure that they were working. With that confirmed, they could begin moving the segments off of the snubbers that they were sitting on during launch to absorb vibrations in a process that will take around 10 days.

The adjustment of the mirrors will take around three months in total, and will require many small, careful tweaks. “Getting there is going to take some patience: The computer-controlled mirror actuators are designed for extremely small motions measured in nanometers,” wrote Marshall Perrin from the Space Telescope Science Institute in a blog post. “Each of the mirrors can be moved with incredibly fine precision, with adjustments as small as 10 nanometers (or about 1/10,000th of the width of a human hair). Now we’re using those same actuators instead to move over a centimeter. So these initial deployments are by far the largest moves Webb’s mirror actuators will ever make in space.”

In addition, each actuator needs to work one at a time for safety reasons, and it can only work for a short period to limit how much heat it creates and spreads to the very cold mirrors. So this will be a long, slow process to get the mirrors tuned.
:sleep:
 
The telescope has successfully deployed!

Now they just need to take 3 months to cool down and slowly adjust the mirrors.
Should be done in mid-April.
James Webb begins careful, slow process of aligning mirrors | Digital Trends
:sleep:

I was wondering what is taking them so long. 10 years ago, you could buy similar actuators more or less off the shelf, which would be able to do this in seconds. Then I found out that the actuators for the JWT where designed in 1997. Really shows how long the telescope was in development and how much progress has been made since then.
 
It is amazing how it can orbit around a Lagrange point as if there were a mass there. I wonder how stable such orbits are and how much propellant will be needed to keep the telescope in place.
 
Evidence of ancient aliens found on mars (possibly)

NASA's Curiosity rover has collected samples of rock from the surface of Mars that are rich in a type of carbon associated with biological processes on Earth.

Curiosity has rolled around Mars since 2012 covering over 16 miles. On board is the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument suite which can analyse organics and gases from atmospheric and solid samples. In this instance, the team used SAM to heat up 24 samples taken from geologically diverse locations in Curiosity's Gale Crater home and heated them to 850°C to release the gases within.

The isotopes were measured using the Tunable Laser Spectrometer (TLS) and, according to the team, "researchers found that nearly half of their samples had surprisingly large amounts of carbon-12 compared to what scientists have measured in the Martian atmosphere and meteorites."

This is significant since, on Earth, processes that would produce this carbon signal tend to be biological. However, the same explanation might not apply to Mars. The planet might have started off with a different set of carbon isotopes than Earth and the carbon might be cycling without any life involved.
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The landscape of the Stimson sandstone formation in Gale crater. In this general location, Curiosity drilled the Edinburgh drill hole, a sample from which was enriched in carbon 12.

Paper (I think) El Reg NASA
 
Black-hole-triggered star formation in the dwarf galaxy Henize 2-10

Mostly about the cool picture:

Black-hole-driven outflows have been observed in some dwarf galaxies with active galactic nuclei, and probably play a role in heating and expelling gas (thereby suppressing star formation), as they do in larger galaxies.
Henize 2-10 is a dwarf starburst galaxy previously reported to have a central massive black hole, although that interpretation has been disputed because some aspects of the observational evidence are also consistent with a supernova remnant.

Here we report optical observations of Henize 2-10 with a linear resolution of a few parsecs. We find an approximately 150-pc-long ionized filament connecting the region of the black hole with a site of recent star formation. Spectroscopy reveals a sinusoid-like position–velocity structure that is well described by a simple precessing bipolar outflow. We conclude that this black-hole outflow triggered the star formation.
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Spoiler Legend :
The inset shows a narrowband Hα+continuum image of the central 6" × 4" region. At the distance of Henize 2-10 (approximately 9 Mpc), 1" corresponds to approximately 44 pc. White contours indicate compact radio emission detected with very long baseline interferometry and mark the location of the central massive black hole, which is also detected in X-rays. Our HST spectroscopy demonstrates that the black hole is driving an outflow that is triggering the formation of young, massive star clusters. The main image is 25" (approximately 1.1 kpc) across.
 
The James Webb telescope has reached its orbit 1 million miles away from earth (1.6 million km) after burning its thrusters for a while.

That is the craziest orbit I've seen.
Sunlight 24/7 and earth is only 5.37 light seconds away.

The French rocket did such a great job of putting it where it was supposed to go that it might have enough fuel to stargaze for 20 years instead of 10. :)

Pirates thankfully did not attempt to steal the $10 billion telescope as it sailed through the Panama Canal to French Guiana and hold it for ransom.
 
Strange radio signals were detected in 2018, but we have just noticed how weird they are

Astronomers have picked up something strange we've never seen before in space: bright bursts of low-frequency radio waves emitted three times an hour from a source within our Milky Way.

"This object was appearing and disappearing over a few hours during our observations," said Natasha Hurley-Walker, a radio astronomer at the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) and lead author of a paper about the transmissions published in Nature on Wednesday.

"That was completely unexpected. It was kind of spooky for an astronomer because there's nothing known in the sky that does that. And it's really quite close to us — about 4,000 light-years away. It's in our galactic backyard."

The signals were discovered by Tyrone O'Doherty, a PhD student at Australia's Curtin University, using the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA), a telescope in the outback Down Under. Some 71 pulses were identified as coming from an object code-named GLEAM-X J 162759.5-523504.3 in array readings collected between January and March 2018.

The mysterious signals appear to be coming from a type of object never encountered before. Fast radio bursts last just a few milliseconds, pulsars blink once every few seconds, and supernovae and active galactic nuclei tend to spew radio waves over even longer periods of time on the order of days or months. The radio beams from the strange entity, however, last anywhere from 30 to 60 seconds.

These flares are also highly polarized which indicates the presence of a strong magnetic field, Gemma Anderson, co-author of the Nature paper and an astronomer at the ICRAR, said. She believes the object is something very bright, and smaller than the Sun.
There is a video below, they are playing up the idea of a strange magnetar or white dwarf, but it is probably aliens, right?


El Reg Paper Organisations Website

Also a picture of the James Web Telescope:

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Multiple views of the Flame Nebula region as seen with the DSS2, VISTA and APEX

The Flame Nebula is the large feature on the left. The smaller feature on the right is the reflection nebula NGC 2023. The iconic Horsehead Nebula is visible on the top right of NGC 2023. The three objects are part of the Orion cloud, a giant gas structure located between 1300 and 1600 light-years away.

The first image was created from photographs in visible light forming part of the Digitized Sky Survey 2 (DSS2). The second image was taken in infrared light with ESO’s Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) at the Paranal Observatory in Chile. Finally, radio observations conducted with the SuperCam instrument on the ESO-operated Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) on Chile’s Chajnantor Plateau are added on top of VISTA’s image.

The radio observations were part of the APEX Large CO Heterodyne Orion Legacy Survey (ALCOHOLS), which looked at the radiation emitted by carbon monoxide (CO) in the Orion cloud to map stellar nurseries. The colours indicate the velocity of the gas, with the red clouds in the background receding faster than the yellow ones in the foreground.
 
First glimpse of lone black hole delights astronomers

Lone black holes probably litter the Galaxy, but they’re extremely hard to spot. Now astronomers have, for the first time, seen an isolated black hole, wandering unattached across the Milky Way. Black holes are typically glimpsed as they interact with other objects, such as companion stars. Studying solo black holes — a separate class of cosmic object — should help scientists to understand how they form, and how abundant they are.

Confirming the black hole’s presence took ten years of observations, using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and several ground-based observatories. A preprint paper detailing the finding, posted on arXiv on 31 January, has yet to be peer reviewed, but is already thrilling astronomers. “I think this is a very exciting and important discovery,” says Selma de Mink, an astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany.

To spot the lone black hole, the international team used a technique known as microlensing. The researchers looked for stars that appeared to brighten as an invisible object passed by, its gravitational pull bending and focusing the stars’ light like a lens. Very massive objects, such as black holes, affect a larger area of space and so brighten the star for longer. But faint, lighter objects — such as neutron stars — moving unusually slowly could also cause a protracted brightening.

Over six years, the group used the Hubble Space Telescope to measure how the passing object seemed to deflect a star’s position in the sky. This deflection is minuscule — gauging it from Earth is equivalent to someone in New York measuring the width of a coin in Los Angeles, says Sahu. Using equations first derived by Albert Einstein in 1915, the researchers were able to calculate that the invisible object’s mass is about seven times that of the Sun: heavy enough that it is almost certain to be a black hole. “They were the first to unambiguously detect a single black hole,” says de Mink.

Finally, extra information came from ground observatories that saw the brightening event. Slight differences in the angle at which the light hit various places around the globe created a parallax effect that pinpointed the distance of the black hole at 1.58 kiloparsecs (5,150 light years) from Earth.

Putting the object’s distance and mass together with the duration of the brightening revealed that the black hole is travelling across our field of view at around 45 kilometres per second. This is slightly faster than the 10–30-kilometre-per-second speeds of other stars in its neighbourhood, says Sahu. That might indicate that the black hole received an extra ‘kick’ when it formed in the core of a supernova explosion. “What a way to get born,” he says.
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Paper
 
SpaceX loses 40 satellites to geomagnetic storm a day after launch
SpaceX has lost dozens of satellites after they were hit by a geomagnetic storm a day after launch, causing them to fall from orbit and burn up.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-60317806
 
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